90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, May 9, 2019

Morning Mistress

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

James Comey is in trouble and he knows it

James Comey’s planet is getting noticeably warmer. Attorney General William Barr’s emissions are the suspected cause.

Barr has made plain that he intends to examine carefully how and why Comey, as FBI director, decided that the bureau should investigate two presidential campaigns and if, in so doing, any rules or laws were broken.

In light of this, the fired former FBI director apparently has decided that photos of him on Twitter standing amid tall trees and in the middle of empty country roads, acting all metaphysical, is no longer a sufficient strategy.

No, Comey has realized, probably too late, that he has to try to counter, more directly, the narrative being set by the unsparing attorney general whose words in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee last week landed in the Trump-opposition world like holy water on Linda Blair. Shrieking heads haven’t stopped spinning since.

related: Smoking Gun Proof Might Damn James Comey, FBI & Possibly the DOJ

And so we’ve seen Comey get real busy lately. First he penned a curious op-ed in The New York Times. Then a Times reporter, with whom Comey has cooperated in the past, wrote a news article exposing an early, controversial investigative technique against the Trump campaign in an attempt to get out front and excuse it. Next, Comey is scheduled to be encouraged on a friendly cable news “town hall.”

In the op-ed, Comey trotted out his now-familiar St. James schtick, freely pronouncing on the morality of others. He sees himself as a kind of Pontiff-of-the-Potomac working his beads, but comes across more like an unraveling Captain Queeg working his ball bearings.

Comey adjudged the president as “amoral.” He declared the attorney general to be “formidable” but “lacking inner strength” unlike — the inference is clear — Comey himself. A strategy of insulting the executioner right before he swings his ax is an odd one but, then, Comey has a long record of odd decisions and questionable judgment.

“Amoral leaders [referring to the president] have a way of revealing the character of those around them,” wrote Comey without a hint of irony or self-awareness. Those whom the former FBI director assembled around him probably rue the day they ever met the man. Most are now fired or disgraced for appalling behaviors that Comey found easy to manipulate to advance his decisions.

Then, just to make sure his op-ed was odd-salted to the max, Comey mused that the president “eats your soul in small bites.” OK, let’s step back for a moment: James Comey appears to be in trouble. His strange, desperate statements and behaviors betray his nervousness and apprehension. In a way, it’s hard to watch.

Comey will claim that everything he did in the FBI was by the book. But after the investigations by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz and U.S. Attorney John Huber, along with Barr’s promised examination, are completed, Comey’s mishandling of the FBI and legal processes likely will be fully exposed.

Ideally, Barr’s examination will aggregate information that addresses three primary streams.

The first will be whether the investigations into both presidential nominees and the Trump campaign were adequately, in Barr’s words, “predicated.” This means he will examine whether there was sufficient justification under existing guidelines for the FBI to have started an investigation in the first place.

The Mueller report’s conclusions make this a fair question for the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign. Comey’s own pronouncement, that the Clinton email case was unprosecutable, makes it a fair question for that investigation.

The second will be whether Comey’s team obeyed long-established investigative guidelines while conducting the investigations and, specifically, if there was sufficient, truthful justification to lawfully conduct electronic surveillance of an American citizen.

The third will be an examination of whether Comey was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous White House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director and attorney general. This, above all, is what’s causing the 360-degree head spins.

There are early indicators that troubling behaviors may have occurred in all three scenarios. Barr will want to zero in on a particular area of concern: the use by the FBI of confidential human sources, whether its own or those offered up by the then-CIA director.

Without diving into the weeds, it’s important to understand that FBI counterintelligence investigations generally proceed...

James Comey is in trouble and he knows it

Comey Continues to Display His Lack of Credibility

Memo Fallout: Nine Questions About James Comey’s Role in Fueling Russia Collusion Conspiracy

Report: Memos Show Comey Himself Used Dossier to Set Up Trump

Attkisson: Trump Was Right To Fire Comey; Here Are 12 Reasons Why

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What Are Democrats Afraid Of?

U.S. Government Media Network Extols “Press Freedom” After Firing Journalists Over Soros Report

It’s ironic that, just weeks after firing journalists behind a broadcast critical of leftwing billionaire George Soros, the head of the U.S. government’s international media networks is proclaiming his support for “press freedom.” U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) Chief John F. Lansing, an Obama appointee, issued a heartfelt statement a few days ago reaffirming his “commitment to the fundamental principles of press freedom.” In the document, titled “Fighting for press freedom, today and everyday,” Lansing assures the world that his agency “will continue to report the truth,” though it recently cost USAGM journalists their jobs. The occasion was World Press Freedom Day, celebrated on May 3, and Lansing expresses deep concern that his taxpayer-funded agency “continues to witness firsthand how a free and independent media is deteriorating worldwide.”

Posted on the agency’s website and disbursed worldwide, the document goes on to say “despite some very dark moments, we have not been silenced. We will continue to report the truth. We will continue to find new ways to get independent reporting and programming to global audiences who rely on it. And we will continue to carry through our mission to inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy. Today, and every day, I am proud to be part of this organization, and call these brave men and women colleagues, as we stand together for press freedom.”

Lansing conveniently omits that he recently utilized Stalinist techniques to retaliate against USAGM journalists and producers involved in the Soros piece. The Spanish-language segment aired in May 2018 on Television Martí and was available for months online until it caught the eye of a scandal-plagued senator tried for bribery and corruption. Eight reporters and editors at the publicly funded media outlet were terminated and, at the request of the disgraced senator, New Jersey Democrat Bob Menendez, Lansing ordered a review of all content to address “patterns of unethical, unprofessional, biased, or sub-standard journalism.” An employee at the Miami, Florida-based Martí headquarters said in a local newspaper report “the environment that has been created by the upper hierarchy of the Agency for Global Media is repressive. People write with fear. Adjectives are no longer used.”

Television Martí—and its radio counterpart—operate under the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB) and comprise one of the USAGM’s five international multimedia networks. The others are Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting. The media outlets get about $685 million a year from American taxpayers and reportedly reach 345 million people worldwide in 59 languages. The global media agency was created to counter disinformation spread by oppressive regimes abroad. The USAGM website states that its mission is “to inform, engage and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.” Television and Radio Martí were created to promote freedom and democracy by providing the people of Cuba with objective news and information programming.
The Soros broadcast focused on his efforts to cripple sovereign governments in Latin America. Judicial Watch was cited as a source because it investigated State Department funding of Soros groups in Colombia and published a report on Soros’ initiatives to advance a radical globalist agenda in Guatemala. Judicial Watch also released a special report documenting the financial and staffing nexus between Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF) and the U.S. government. In that document, Judicial Watch connects the dots between U.S.-funded entities and OSF affiliates to further the Hungarian-born philanthropist’s agenda seeking to destabilize legitimate governments, erase national borders, target conservative politicians, finance civil unrest, subvert institutions of higher education, and orchestrate refugee crises for...

FAIR WARNING:

If you are far left of center, this will trigger you.

This will upset you.

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES CONTINUE
BEYOND THIS POINT.

Now if you have a healthy sense of humor, prepare for leftist lunacy that we will mock, laugh at, and disparage in every way possible. We will intentionally trigger leftists, and enjoy every second of it.

For all the scary talk about what nefarious deeds AI will be capable of one day, a geeky fight that tends to spark debate about whether the technology is a net positive or could eventually bring about the destruction of humanity, there’s at least one observable skill that AI is increasingly mastering right now — a skill that AI is starting to actually get so good at it may even shock you.

Play the video below to see for yourself.

What the video above depicts is a collection of humans that an AI-generated algorithm — courtesy of DataGrid, a startup based at Japan’s Kyoto University — designed. The poses, the clothes, the different hairstyles, stances, everything — the AI just came up with it all, in a stunning bit of understanding about the humans who occupy the world around it.

According to a translation of the text that accompanies the video, the researchers used what’s called a Generative Adversarial Network, or GAN, to generate the high-resolution (1024×1024) images of nonexistent humans. It goes on to suggest that this kind of thing could be useful in a variety of ways, such as by creating virtual models for industries like advertising and fashion.

The GAN involves one artificial neural network essentially trying to keep “fooling” another one, until the second one can no longer distinguish between (in this case) real human images versus computer-generated ones. Seeing this kind of thing for yourself, it’s a reminder that we’re definitely in for some strange times as deepfakes and the like begin to proliferate, with a video like this underscoring how adept AI is becoming at creating images of fake humans.

To see a different version of this same thing in action, check out the website ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com, which we’ve reported on previously. It’s the same concept as the video above, except in the case of that website, you just keep hitting refresh and you’ll be greeted by the image of an insanely real looking human that was in fact created by an AI and doesn’t exist.

This technology is impressive, but at the same time it also seems to herald something that humanity still has not fully come to grips with yet. It’s only a matter of time before AI masters the creation of fake human speech and other things that, along with the images, can be integrated into a full package and really give us a hard time with separating fact from fiction. Maybe someone will develop an AI one day that masters the...